An autonomous vehicle is a vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment and navigating with minimal or no human input. In particular, an autonomous vehicle can observe its surrounding environment using a variety of sensors and can attempt to comprehend the environment by performing various processing techniques on data collected by the sensors. Given knowledge of its surrounding environment, the autonomous vehicle can identify an appropriate motion path through such surrounding environment.
In some implementations, an autonomous vehicle can include a computing system configured to assist in autonomous operation. The autonomous vehicle computing system can include processors, memory devices, or other components which may need to be operated at or below one or more temperature thresholds in order for the computing system to operate reliably. For example, operating the autonomous vehicle computing system may generate heat, which if not removed from one or more computing system components, may damage the one or more computing system components.
However, providing sufficient cooling to the computing system can present a challenge. For example, due to space constraints, the computing system may need to be located in a small compartment with little or no airflow. In such a configuration, the heat generated by the computing system may rapidly heat the small compartment, putting the computing system components at risk of overheating. Further, as computing systems are upgraded, a previously installed cooling system may become obsolete due to the new computing system components being incompatible with the previously installed cooling system.